I have been an Evangelion fan for almost as long as I have been an anime fan, and that is going on 2 decades (wow I’m old), but I have always had mixed feelings about the rebuild movies. This will be more of a rant then a proper review, so even though I will talk about the general plot and main story, this will not be an indepth analysis of the lore or anything like that (that will have to wait for me to rewatch the original series, something I haven’t done in some years).

I have watched the first two in anticipation for the release of 3.333 but then between that and the most recent installement I grew tired and fell off with the series a bit, never actually watching the 3.0+1.0 movie. Recently, I rewatched these movies with someone that had only experienced the original TV anime over a decade ago, in preparation to finally watch the last entry and I was once again struck with mixed feelings that were best described with a question my companion directed at me, the Eva authority in the room in their eyes: “So what was the point of all this? They keep starting instrumentality and never going through with it, destroying the planet and killing a lot of people in the process, but nothing actually happens… Was this canon?”. I had no clear answer to these question, not in the moment and not in the last 10 years of dealing with this exact same feeling, so I will be writting this in order to maybe reach a conclusion.

I first watched Eva (the TV series) around 2012, shortly after getting into anime, at the right time for it to have a world shattering effect on my teenage psyche. Until then I had been watching your classic shounen like One Piece, Fullmetal Alchemist, Fairy Tail, Soul Eater along side some of the popular new anime from that era, like Madoka Magika and Sword Art Online, and my mind was already blown by this new storytelling medium. And then I got recomended Eva by someone I met at a convention and it literally changed the course of life. It was one of the shows that became an integral part of my sense of indentity as an anime fan, and there’s nothing better for a 15 year old kid than to think only you are smart enought to have uncovered the truth behind this criptic and pretencious piece of art. No one understands like you do, because it spoke to you in particular. And looking back it did truly help me work out a lot of my own issues and insecurities coming into and then out of adolescence. The way I saw and understood the characters helped me change how I saw myself, and over the course of the years it has been interesting to see how I see different parts of myself in different characters and how that as well changed over time. All of this to say I have watched a lot of evangelion over the years (I have always been “the evangelion guy” in my anime friend group, even if my lore knowledge isn’t exactly enciclopedic), I’ve seen how it changed in the public’s eye with the rise of the anime fandom’s presence online, and also with the rise of anime fandom into the mainstream.

In my eyes, Eva went from “a cult classic” that everyone should watch to an inpenetrable masterpiece, that only people with big enough IQ’s can even fathom to comprehend the surface details of, let alone enjoy (a lot like how Serial Experiments Lain has been treated over the years). The part of this perception that is most stricking for me is that in my personal circles, its being propagated by people that have never even watched the show, they just assume that it’s too complex to understand and so they don’t even try. I will not claim that the anime is accessible by any means, but that is because it’s mostly up to the audience to interpret and analyse. The lore exists but it’s as a complement to a deeply personal story on human connection and relationships. I would argue that most if not all of the “lore” works as figurative support for the themes conveyed through the narrative, not as an end on their own, and that was one of the most fascinating aspects that first drew me to the show: How style is used as substance, in the vein of Kunihiku Hikuhara’s style (commentary on which deserve its own eventual rant). This is why all the religious iconography can at the same time give a deeply religious tone to the series and just be present for aesthetic flare, without introducing any contradictions to the personal interpretation of the message of the show as necessarily about Christianity as a religion. Which lines up with a famous idea that Hideaki Anno (the director) “only used Christian simbols beacuse they were cool”. This idea comes from two sets of inverviews (one with Anno himself in 1996 called “The World of Hideaki Anno”, and another with Kazuya Tsurumaki, the assistant director, on Otakon in 2001), where it was revealed that the Christian simbols were used due to their rarity within japanese culture, which gave them a mystic aesthetic that would distinguish the series from other mechas of the era.

This complex interplay between the text and the aesthetic, the style and the substance was one of the main reasons that sustained my interest in Evangelion, long after the actual plot grew overly familiar in my mind. And this is one of the main reasons that created my disconnect with the Rebuild movies. When I watched Evangelion for the first time only the first two rebuild movies had come out (the third had only been released in theathers in Japan), and upon watching them I was left with a feeling of confusion. Not about the story (mainly because the first two movies rethread the events of the first half of the TV series, with minor changes) but about their purpose. In my eyes the original story had a satisfying and optimitisc conclusion, where Shinji decides to embrace his humanity and the hurting that comes from forming connections with others, the struggle to try to understand and be understood by others. He choose that over the alternative which was complete union between all human beings, meaning complete understanding at the cost of individuality. To me that reads as a rather positive outlook to reform how one sees interpersonal relationships, so why was this closed scar being torn open again, to reiterate the same point none the less? My answer has been money for a long time. Repackaging Eva into a more digestable form to sell it to the fans again while bringing in new audiences for whom the original show either looked dated or was too intimidating. This idea was reinforced by certain changes such as increased inner monologues explaining the situation (like you would find in most shounen anime), and other design and aesthetic changes that modernized the look, feel and sound of the world.

I watched Evangelion 3.0 roughly a year after its theathrical debut, when it released for home video and that was the moment I really felt like I had been pushed off the bandwagon, like I was no longer the target audience for Evangelion. The story that I had known, with its complex theming was gone, replaced with a sci-fi alternative universe that gave no clues on how the previous changes to the canon until then were relevant. I felt much like Shinji (or Urashima Tarou, if you know what that means), while holding no sympathy for him. He spent the movie doing very little with no character motivation, then out of nowhere gaining a strong will to retrieve the spears with Kaoru, so much so that he stubbornly presses on even when Kaoru begs him to stop for a second and think. And because of that he (once again) causes mass destruction in the world and the death of someone dear to him. The third movie ends almost like the second: with the world in ruins and Shinji being a depressed whimp. Needless to say I wasn’t impressed, and despite the upgrade in visual quality, too much of the CGI models looked clunky, leading the massive fights to look silly and rather hard to follow. A clear downgrade from the original series in basically all areas.

Now, over 10 years from the first viewing of 3.0 and with the context of 3.0+1.0, I am glad to announce that the movie does benefit from having a sequel, as most of the set up from 3.0 has a pay-off in 3.0+1.0, mainly when it comes to the circunstances and character motivations introduced. However nothing that happened in 3.0+1.0 made me think that 3.0 was better in hindsight, and I was still let down by a lot of the presentation of that movie. Overall, 3.0+1.0 was the most interesting Rebuild movie, mainly in the ways it twisted itself into a knot to diverge so drastically from the original series only to arrive at the exact same conclusion with the characters in roughly the same place (mentally). I really appreciated the humanization that was given to Rei, even though it was layed on super thick unlike the subtle development she had in the original (first half) of the story, and the whole section of the movie dedicated to the impact of the Near Third Impact on the world was an interesting piece of pos-apocaliptic naturalism remiscent of Nausica of the Valey of the Wind. I was a big fan of Miyamura Yuko’s (Asuka) performance during the whole movie, at once being able to convey the same girl we (and Shinji) know, while embuying her voice with 14 years worthy of time. Similar praise is due to Hayashibara Megumi (Rei) for her nuanced performance, really showing the gradual way Rei was becoming more and more lively over the course of the movie.

Now that the praise is out of the way we can really dig our fingers into the meat of the movie, which i have already alluded to. the movie ended the same way as the og everyone had to have a spelled out “good” ending bcs we cant have ambiguous text, everything needs to be spoon feed (like gend0’s backstory) mari is just a nothing burguer, she has no personality per se, she has no depth,. she just impacts the plot and does things for no reason and then ends with shinji for no reason, they have no questiry. Just bcs she is based on anno’s wife and he wanted shinji to end up witha girl is not a good enoguh esxcuse for ther to exist. In the end and unlike the og, shinji needed someone to save him, which i think its s worse message than the previuos one, where you could change to accept and change yourself